For the last year we’ve been doing work for our friends at Enoetic. I use friends not in the colloquial sense, but in the literal sense – we’ve worked with them for years as contractors and co-workers at various companies and have developed friendships along the way. They’re basically the smartest people we know and have developed a very interesting and useful new product for people with lots of digital photos.

Most people take one of three approaches to organizing digital photos: tags, folders or not at all. Even the most anal photo-organizers will run into problems trying to find specific photos. Enoetic’s software, Photology, makes finding digital photos easy. You install the software, it indexes all photos on your computer, and then you tell it what you are looking for by selecting a combination of filters to “make the haystack smaller” (you know, like the needle in a haystack metaphor).

Let’s say you are looking for the picture of your daughter’s first steps. You remember that the photo was taken at a park, in the afternoon, and that she was wearing her favorite pink shirt. To find the photo, you click the filters for “outside” (since the park was outside), “afternoon” (for the time of day) and “pink” (for the shirt) and Photology quickly returns all photos that meet those criteria, making the haystack smaller.

Enoetic has tons of experience in image processing and feature identification from their days of developing software for electron microscopes – the experience pays off because Photology does a really good job of finding your photos. Read these articles by JK if you are interested in how it all works:

• Automated Image Tagging – Part 1
• Automated Image Tagging – Part 2

Our part in all of this? We collaborated with Enoetic on the Photology logo, software user experience (how it is used), and user interface design (how it looks). Click here to see our work.

Get Photology